Sep 19, 2005 7:46 AM,

XO to deploy Convedia servers

By Carol Wilson

XO Interactive, a major provider of hosted Interactive Voice Response services, will deploy Convedia CMS-6000 media servers in its national Voice over IP network to develop new IP-based services for its customers and for its parent company, XO Communications.

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“We have gone to Convedia to adopt a hardware-based media server because it gives us a lot of cost benefits, in the short term, to drive more efficiencies in PIN management,” said Jeff Bradley, vice president and general manager of XO Interactive. “But we are also looking to leverage Convedia to offer conferencing services for XOC and we are looking at how we might again leverage Convedia media server architecture to provide hosted IVR.”

XO Interactive supports most of the major long-distance providers in their sales of prepaid calling cards at retail outlets, he said. “We do the point-of-sale, the credit card activation, the recharging and customers service,” Bradley explained.

“We had been using a software-based solution and moving to Convedia’s hardware-based option, we get greater reliability and higher density of call volumes as well,” he said. “Prepaid business margins are awfully tight, it’s awfully competitive. Everybody is looking to crunch those numbers down as closely as possible. That was one of the many reasons we chose Convedia after evaluating 11 vendors and testing six.”

XO Interactive will be positioned to develop IP-based applications, and is looking at conferencing, both internally and as an XO Communications’ service.

“Right now, XOC offers conferencing out in the marketplace through a vendor outside XO,” Bradley said. “We are looking very critically at whether we could host the conferencing business with XO Interactive as opposed to an entity outside of XO. No question, the conferencing business is moving to a Convedia media service type architecture. Part B to that – XOC being large national local exchange – we do a fair amount of internal conference calls, and we will be able to host those conference calls on a our platform, which makes sense from a cost perspective.”